Thought Leaders in Big Data: Marc Alacqua CEO and Steve Davis CTO of Signafire (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with a little bit of an ecosystem map of your space. What is your worldview in terms of who are the players, what are the issues? What does the world around you look like? Where do you position yourself in that universe?

Marc Alacqua: In the Big Data space, there are hundreds and hundreds of companies. We try to focus where our strength is based on our history. It’s about that data fusion side of it. A lot of people talk about data integration. A lot of that focus has been on the data lake. That’s the big trend. Companies feel that they’ve accomplished a lot by creating this data lake.

When we get there, the question is, “What do we do with that data?” Your data is in one spot but so what? We focus on the fusion piece – taking all of this data that looks very different and creating unified data model with an end-to-end solution. We can help you drive decisions. That is one piece in the overall big data universe but that’s where our strength is and that’s where we bring some unique capabilities.

Sramana Mitra: What are the competitor comparable of what you are doing? Whom do you see in deals?

Marc Alacqua: Different names get thrown out. We’ve gone head to head with IBM Watson. On more than one occasion, we’ve come in to help people when they’ve struggled trying to make Watson fit with their problem. We’ve been the cavalry coming to the rescue.

Sramana Mitra: That’s a good segue into use cases where you are coming to the rescue of. What can you do that others cannot do?

Steve Davis: In a lot of ways, the technology advancements have driven the discussion around Big Data rather than the problems that people are trying to solve driving the discussion. What we end up running up against is companies that either have no experience in Big Data or they have some experience based around whatever the buzzword technology of the day is. There is a lot of open source platforms like Hadoop that people recognize.

There’s a lot of companies like IBM Watson that people recognize. Their gut instinct is to implement that solution without really understanding that it’s not necessarily the solution to their problem. That’s one of the places where Signafire excels – looking beyond the limited vision of how we consolidate our data into a data lake.

When companies do that, they end up with just generating reports of numbers that don’t really mean anything whereas our approach is integrating to a common data model and providing a platform for analyst to collaborate and work on problems together and solve real-world problems. The technology enables that extended vision.

In some cases, we’re brought in to completely replace large parts of the existing infrastructure. Sometimes, we’re brought in to help augment the systems that are already in place. There are a couple of scenarios where we have integrated with existing data lakes because the company realized the data lake wasn’t really the solution. It was a step in their journey towards solving their problem.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Marc Alacqua CEO and Steve Davis CTO of Signafire
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